Latest Contact Center Best Practices

The debate over the merits of moving an enterprise’s contact center operations to the cloud has long been addressed and settled. If you are in need of greater market adaptability, can benefit from a flexible workforce, need to simplify your infrastructure, operate a seasonal business, need to reduce company costs…and so on, the concept easily sells itself. In fact, with 70% of companies using on-premise solutions planning to make the move in the next 1-3 years, you would be in good company.

However, the logistics of successfully migrating to a cloud contact center solution are contingent on your ability to properly prepare for the change. It doesn’t have to be difficult (and it usually isn’t), but here are a few things to consider:

Over the weekend, the weather finally changed, with temperatures in the high 60’s on Saturday. It’s not something I generally get excited about, but after this year’s brutal winter I took advantage of the break from the cold to go on a long run with friends. It was on this run that someone asked me, “How is it that my home phone never goes down but that a number for one of Ashburn’s biggest data centers can, and recently did, with only a busy tone for those trying to get through?”

Knowing what I do for a living, he went on to explain that one of the employees at the data center had been fired and chosen to turn off the switches before walking out, which brought the whole center to a standstill. In fact, not only was he able to bring down all of the managed hosted services, but the VOIP-based PBX system was also shutoff, which prevented the entire support staff from making or receiving calls. To make matters worse, every client who tried to call customer support heard nothing but a busy tone. Doesn’t help when one of those clients is the state government.

Contact center administrators have a lot on their plates. They have to stay on top of all of their agents and make sure everything is running smoothly every single day. With 24/7 support being a must in this day and age, most contact center administrators are not always working in their office or even at the call center. In some cases, the contact center agents are not even working together in a single call center. With 3CLogic, not only can agents sign in from anywhere that they have internet, administrators can log into the contact center portal online from any web browser. This way, administrators can check reports, adjust projects, assign leads, and more; from their smart phone or tablet, with no app needed. They simply log into the portal from any web browser of their choosing: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc.

We as humans are all hesitant to adopt new things from time to time; we like to steer away from the unknown and stick with what we are used to. It is just human nature. While this may be a more comforting way for people to go about their day-to-day lives, there are so many missed opportunities that could arise. A couple examples come to mind of how this mind-set has led to disaster for different companies and individuals.

I’ve been interested with the concept of the bitcoin since it began surfacing in the media recently. I caught wind of this article about the Winklevoss twins (or Winklevii, if you prefer) getting involved with funding for bitcoins at the beginning of the summer.